


Nothing Ever Truly Lost

by kyanve



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Little bit of trolling the Garrison, Minor AU, Shiro gets a vacation whether he likes it or not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-19 13:57:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14875052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyanve/pseuds/kyanve
Summary: At the end of Blackout, the Black Lion teleports Shiro to "safety".Unfortunately, for a being with that kind of power that hasn't been in circulation for ten thousand years, something that registers as "safe" is REALLY far in the middle of nowhere.While Shiro finds himself somewhere friendly, he's also not thrilled to be so far away from the fighting, and Very Unsure of a local's agenda to get him to relax.My piece for the free Blessed and Possessed e-zine!  (Go find it >.> )





	Nothing Ever Truly Lost

Shiro had no idea what to expect after apparently blacking out at the end of the fight with Zarkon.

Waking up in an unfamiliar bed with sunlight streaming through the window was definitely not among anything that might’ve occurred to him.

It was warm enough for the windows to be open, with light blankets and a breeze; the bed was either soft material under the fabric or had a padded cushion over the top of it. The walls curved up toward the top of the room in earth tones with gold and green accents, cabinets built into the walls. There was a well-padded cot nearby with its own pillow and blanket. Low boxes built just outside the windows were overgrown with tangles of green. 

He sat up, staring at the far wall and the windows. The sky outside was clear and blue, but then, it’d be hard for the sky to be any other color and be a safe breathable atmosphere for humans. 

He wasn’t in his armor, or much of anything, which probably should’ve alarmed him more, but the entire scenario was so incongruous and harmless after the last few times he’d ended up somewhere unplanned that he was having a hard time mustering more than dull, tired confusion. There was some kind of light, loose robe draped over a stand by the bed, and after a minute of scanning the room, he did spot his armor set out in a corner, the underlayer folded up neatly with it. 

His head felt full of cotton, but the more the haze of sleep faded, the more he remembered what had been going on and realized he had no idea where anyone else was or what was going on.

He had to find the others - to see if they were there.

He almost went for the robe, but there was an uneasy buzz of nerves picking it up when he had no idea where he was, who was there, or what had happened that led to a good few minutes debating between it and his armor. The entire arrangement was innocuous, but it could be trap, it could be a trick; if it was genuine then it was also possible he’d be tracked and there could be an attack any minute. 

Or going down in armor could read as an insult or threat to his hosts if he was separated from everyone else.

There was a faint chirping from one of the window boxes that ran through a few different tones, like a cricket that had figured out how to play more than one note. 

He closed his eyes with a strained pause, swallowing the various list of worries, and pulled the robe on. It was clearly meant to be loose, but it still didn’t hang right, snug in spots where it seemed to have been made for someone similar height but lighter built and with a different skeletal structure. 

The way down was a narrow staircase that spiraled around some kind of a tower with automated doors that opened on approach. There was no sign of any effort made to keep him in; no audible alarms or signals, but he was sure it had to be monitored.

The lower floor had similar architecture, and looked like some kind of small apartment. A case with a few hovering readouts in a language he didn’t think he’d ever seen held a set of light armor, a clamp on the side holding a spear with a thin, curved head. 

Passing closer to one of the windows gave him a view of some kind of city that spread out down a steep hillside, the apartment high up in a taller building.

The door opened before he could get too involved in trying to identify anything about the city, a harried alien rushing in and spotting him with a short sigh of relief as they caught their breath. Pointed ears that almost reminded him of a deer ticked and stilled as the alien stepped all the way in, letting the door shut. He’d never seen the species before, large almond gold and violet slit-pupiled eyes, sleek built and tawny, dressed in close-fitting gold and brown. 

“Oh good, you’re alright. Relatively.” They paused, pulling back straight as if recovering from a dead sprint. “I’d meant to be there when you woke up, but the doctor had no guess exactly when you’d come around, and you seemed so solidly out that I thought I could afford a few vargas.” 

He wasn’t sure what to say or what was going on, and didn’t manage more than a dumb headtilt.

The alien mirrored the headtilt, and he hoped he read the expression right as bemusement. “Wayfinder Pariq. If our check of your armor against ten thousand year old archives was sound, then you are a Paladin of Voltron?” 

Well, that cut some explanation. “Yes, and-” Shiro paused, stopping himself; he wanted to launch straight into questions, but knew he should be exercising some basic courtesy. “My name is Shiro, and if the others aren’t here, I need to get back to them.” 

Pariq folded his arms, tapping a lightly clawed finger on his forearm. “You might want to start with ‘where is this’.” 

Shiro closed his eyes with a stifled noise of irritation. 

Pariq thought it over, then took off his outer jacket to hang by the door, gesturing laconically occasionally. “You’re basically in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Your homeworld is closer to the Empire than we are, because we fled here about ten thousand decaphoebs ago to hide until the lions resurfaced or there was some way to fight back effectively. We only hear about anything in the Empire from some Drij smugglers - what your people call “Greys”. Earth is about a phoeb’s distance out with our fastest hyperspace drives, and the fringes of Imperial territory is a few days past that. And no, we don’t have anything with enough range to try to contact anyone from this far out - making a lot of noisy transmissions tends to be counterproductive to hiding.” The slim alien wandered into the apartment, rifling through cabinets.

Weeks. He was weeks away from even being within reach of everyone else, and God only knew what was going on with them. Weeks to get within communication range, the last time he’d seen everyone they were fighting Zarkon and had just been hit with a planetkiller, and Pariq was humming as if nothing were going on.

Patience. He needed to be patient, and find out what resources there were, or some way to get the weird alien he was dealing with to take this seriously and get him back to everyone else.

“You said you were waiting for the lions to be awake again, right?”

“Mm-hm.” Pariq turned around, walking over to hold out some kind of metal can with thin foil covering an opening on top. Shiro accepted it, distractedly picking at the foil with his attention mostly on the alien. 

“And you know I’m a Paladin, so - that means we’re going to go back to fight, right?” Patience. His people needed him, and in order to get to his people, he had to deal with someone who seemed to have zero sense of urgency whatsoever. 

Pariq already had the foil off his can. “Oh, yeah, we’re working on that. We’re not going to have a solid force ready to go that fast - you know, an eon or so hiding to dust off.” The slim alien draped over a curved couch, motioning to a chair nearby. “So you’ve got time to relax, and honestly, after how leveled you were when you appeared here, you probably need it.” 

There was a tiny pit of dread at the likely answer to how long that was going to take. “I can’t just - that’s my friends, they’re not here, I don’t know what happened to them or if they’re in danger, I can’t just - sit here for months!” He almost forgot about the can in his hand, liquid sloshing as he made a few frantic gestures toward the window.

Pariq swirled his can in one hand, watching Shiro for a moment. “If it helps, the Drij said the Voltron lions are on the move and the Empire’s a bit of a mess - nobody’s heard from Zarkon since some big battle around when you showed up.” The alien took a sip of whatever-it-was. “So your friends are okay enough to be causing trouble.” 

Shiro stared at him with a faint eyetic. He could’ve said that at the beginning and saved his nerves. 

But everyone was okay, and that was the important part. 

He took a deep breath, trying to unclench his jaw, closed his eyes, and exhaled slowly, finally sitting down heavily in the chair. Zarkon was - hopefully gone, everyone was okay, he was just… stranded in the middle of absolute nowhere. “Okay. They’re okay.” He took another slow breath; patience, panicking or snapping at Pariq - even if he was a smug shit - wouldn’t do any good. 

“You know you’re not helping anyone like this.” Pariq gestured at him; he was hunched over in the chair, shoulders knotted, hands wrapped around the still not-open can. “Living in the fight even when you’re worlds away from it. Even machines break if you never give them a rest.” 

Shiro shot the alien a sour look. “I can’t just take a vacation when everyone else is fighting for their lives.”

“Why not? It’s not like there’s much else you can do until we’re ready to move.” 

He narrowed his eyes; the alien hadn’t even really looked over, still draped over the couch as if he was chiding him for panicking over an exam rather than a war with lives at stake. “There has to be something I can do here to help us get out there sooner.”

No amount of ‘aliens may not have the same body language’ was going to save this one. Shiro knew the sudden jerk of shoulders shaking that went with fighting off laughing. “How are you with hyperspace engineering?” 

Shiro opened his mouth, but there was nothing he could say to argue.

“Stability checks on nanoalloys and alchemic ceramics?” Pariq was finally looking over, but it was sideways with the beginnings of a smirk crossing his face. 

Shiro closed his mouth, glaring.

“Quantum-based coding debugging? How fast are you at learning to read alien languages?”

He folded his arms, sinking deeper into a helpless scowl.

“That’s what I thought.” He was smug enough that Shiro could almost feel it. “From the records we had, it didn’t seem like the Black Lion was likely to grab someone with an engineering focus.”

He inhaled, shifting to rub the bridge of his nose and try to rein in his frustration. It wasn’t that Pariq was wrong about the list of things he wouldn’t be any help with, it was the slim alien being a smug ass about it. 

“Alright, fine. There’s not much I can do here.” It was irritably clipped and more petulant than he’d thought it would sound. “I would greatly appreciate some answers right now as to who you people are and how you know that much about the lions.” He was trying to modulate it, and failing, irritation pulling a few words here and there through clenched teeth.

“Because one of our people was one of the original Paladins and our records didn’t get torched?” Pariq was giving him an odd look. “First one down, too; after she died and Altea went, there were a few ships put together in secret, to smuggle as many of our people out the back as we could without Zarkon figuring it out. Slipped the idea to some of the other leaders, too, but we mostly don’t know if they took the hint or not. None of the old homeworlds survived, but the trick seemed to’ve worked, because we haven’t had any Galra cruisers coming looking for us.” 

Pariq drained part of whatever the drink was, and Shiro was finding it hard to keep as strong a grip on the irritation as what he’d said sank in. There was no ‘you don’t understand, people are dying’ with an entire population of survivors of near-genocide. 

No long-range communications to avoid Galra notice, keeping track of the Empire via occasional smugglers; he’d come into the war via a sudden shock and having an illusion of peaceful existence shattered.

These people had already lost one home, and lived with it prowling outside their door for the entirety of human history.

He shrank a little, feeling worse about almost losing his temper, and started picking at the foil on his can. “So you probably know this fight better than I do.”

He was pretty sure the response started with the equivalent of a raised eyebrow. “The history of it, at least. When we’re closer to leaving you can help fill in details about what the front lines look like anymore… but, that’s still a ways off.” The alien shifted to sit up. “In the meantime, you just hit Zarkon harder than anyone has in ten thousand years, and I’d say that calls for celebration as soon as you’re up to going out.” 

******************

Shiro had not been prepared for the celebrity status that went with being The Black Paladin and the news of Zarkon’s possible defeat, and Pariq hadn’t warned him, either.

In fact, the alien seemed to take special joy in the flabbergasted deer-in-headlights freeze he got for the first couple of weeks whenever he got recognized. They hadn’t had many opportunities to hang around after a victory, and one or another of the others usually took most of the spotlight, with Allura drawing the rest for diplomacy’s sake. 

Usually the attention settled down after a few minutes, and Pariq had enough mercy to wade in and redirect if it went on too long. Shiro’s reflex to freeze eventually faded into awkwardly fumbling through routines of half-remembered press conferences and college appearances he’d done for the Garrison, back before the Galra and the arenas. The celebrity status never entirely faded, enough that almost every place they went insisted Shiro and anyone with him didn’t need to pay for things like drinks and meals. 

The one time he voiced suspicion that Pariq’s insistence on going out sightseeing and hitting restaurants and bars was abusing that just got deflected with, “What, you earned it”, and a subject change. 

He’d done PR once, and had been more used to having accolades and public attention for his accomplishments. 

Now, it felt like dredging something up from another lifetime to awkwardly wedge it in, covering the necessity of fighting for their lives. 

When he got breathing room, every variation on “We were doing what we had to”, “there wasn’t really another choice”, and “It was a mess, we barely made it” was met with an occasional elbow and reminders of how much of it was more than anyone else had managed.

“It’s only because the lions grabbed us” earned the longest dead exasperated stare he’d ever gotten. 

Eventually, he wore down to just giving up and accepting it, even if the feeling they should've been talking about someone else never entirely went away. 

Something else didn't feel quite right, and one part of it finally clicked a few weeks into his stay with the exiled civilization.

He knew he'd gotten a few questioning stares and glances at the prosthetic, but the only random people on the street that hadn't opted for politely avoiding the subject were children; parents usually intervened, and he’d laughed it off as alright - kids were easily pacified with simple, honest answers that didn’t need any real detail. That wasn't too unexpected.

The people in command and intelligence, the people who rationally had every reason to care, didn't even seem to notice it. It was possible they had stayed isolated enough to not recognize the Galra tech, but if that were the case, then leaving them in the dark was nagging at him. Every time he thought about telling them, his throat knotted up and he had to wrestle with a pit of tension until finally giving up and accepting the first distraction to get away from it.

Finally one evening, getting back to Pariq's apartment, he swallowed the lump and opted for just blurting it out.  
"So - uh - about the arm." He held up the prosthetic hand awkwardly. 

Pariq looked back, head canted and one ear angled off oddly. "What about it?"

"It's Galra. I mean, Galra made it." He paused, fumbling at words and ending up with just a couple awkward attempts at charades, trying to not let jags of images and remembered panic creep back in too much. "Druids."

Pariq took a moment, shifting his jaw thoughtfully. "The doctors…. kind of noticed. Little hard to miss. Besides," he closed his eyes and inhaled slowly, then let it out, "we uh, do try to keep track of things, even if we're mostly relying on others for intel. And, you know, the Drij being familiar with humans, means they did notice you showing up on public radar and all..."

The silence hung in the air as he trailed off. It wasn't that he didn't know the arenas were a public affair that meant he'd been well known within the Empire, he just tried very hard to block that detail out most of the time.

"Oh."

He stayed just inside the doorway, and didn't really move or get past that reminder until Pariq was shoving a can into his hand and steering him by the shoulder to the small raised table and stools. "I figured it was one of those things to just leave alone unless you brought it up, yanno? Call it military experience; forcing it never helps." 

Shiro opened the can and drained half of it without responding. 

Pariq waited a couple of minutes, chin resting on one hand. "Did you want to talk about it?" 

Shiro's "No" was firmly out before it really registered that he'd said it.

"Right then." He gave another minute, then stood and walked away, returning with a blanket that he draped over Shiro, poking at it a little to bunch it around Shiro's shoulders so it wouldn't just slide off; that was enough of something Shiro wasn't really expecting for him to shake off some of the daze he'd fallen into, turning to stare in confusion at the alien.

Pariq was acting as if the whole thing were normal, sliding back onto the other stool across from Shiro. "So, you're from Earth, right? It's hard to talk to the Drij and not hear about it, they get weird and enthusiastic about any little pre-interstellar world they find, but they're..." Pariq rolled a couple fingers in the air. "Excitable tourists. Not like hearing from someone actually from a place." 

Shiro caught the implied prompt there, and even if it was probably just Pariq tossing out an opportunity to change the subject, Shiro was still grateful for the lifeline. "Definitely. It was surreal enough hearing what people around the Garrison thought Japan was like sometimes, and that was just different countries on different continents." 

Pariq gave him a sly grin. "Do you want me to start with some of what I heard from them, or do you just want to fill me in and hear that part later?" 

Shiro grimaced. "I don't think I'm ready to hear what they've come up with yet."

It took fumbling; he'd known that his time on Earth had felt distant, but he'd avoided thinking about it too hard, only skirting it when commiserating with the other paladins about things they missed.

Slowly, he managed to dig out pieces until it was less of a struggle, with Pariq asking occasional prompting questions as he faltered. The sunrise over the desert scrubland, the rattlesnake that lived under Keith's shed, the retro diner by the Garrison that never changed, the fall colors in the mountains back in Japan, chasing fireflies in summer when he was younger. He didn't even realize how long it went until he caught himself nodding off, a sharp startle as he almost lost balance on the stool before Pariq herded him to bed. 

He didn't think Pariq had paid much attention to it, until a few days later, when a random foray outside the city with a smaller aircraft turned into barely missing a sunset over an arid desert bluff and camping out under the stars until sunrise in a small outdoor-shelter with a "roof" that could turn transparent. The constellations were alien, although Pariq was more than willing to point out the ones his people had come up with in their time on that planet, but sunrise through a breathable atmosphere was the same red-gold as ever. 

****************

He'd lost track of time when there was finally word that they were close to leaving soon, with plans for Pariq and one of the Drij ships to help smuggle him back into Galra space and make contact with the Castle. He almost dreaded the launch date, but that dread revived a few small pangs of guilt.

He’d get back to everyone else soon, and it would be good to see them again.

The Drij captain sounded almost as nervous about the whole thing as he felt, filling the introduction and planning with jokes that fell flat and bits of failed sarcasm about possible things that could go wrong. Eventually they calmed down a little, as contingencies got hashed out for almost any disaster they could reasonably think of. It finally trailed off into minutiae, the Drij captain occasionally mulling something over hard. They didn’t say anything about it until all the important plans were out of the way, as Pariq's commander checked if there was anything else left.

"Well, I was thinking, while we're on the way..."

****************

Shiro had never been to Vegas before. He had never thought about the place being much besides gambling, which the Drij smuggler - Thaz - did admit was a big deal, but there was an entire set of tourist draws and events and shows that'd sprung up around and sometimes inside the casinos. 

Shiro drowned a temptation to feel guilt over joining Thaz and Pariq in wearing the Wayfinder commander down until she finally agreed to plan around the small group leaving a little early to spend a week in Vegas. Thaz had a compelling argument it was hard to deny, anyway.

Their ship had a regular routine, they'd said. 

It would look suspicious if they didn't stop and goof off like they usually would, they'd said.

They had never drawn attention on Earth before and could easily avoid it, they'd said.

That part had turned out to be a lie of omission, but one only confessed to Shiro on the way. There was an ulterior motive, but it was one that Shiro could appreciate enough to banish the last few bits of guilt about ‘goofing off’ on his way back to the war. 

The three of them had spent most of the visit just blending in with the usual chaos being tourists, Thaz and Pariq making some effort at passing themselves off as clever costumes. At first Shiro hadn't believed it would work, but then Thaz had started listing off how many 'hoax' photos of aliens doing something inane and silly had actually been real Drij. 

He didn't ask how Thaz handled finances; he valued what sanity he had. 

On the last day, after sneaking into a concert on impulse and perching in the stadium's rafters, the trio hurried out, Thaz and Shiro finding a good spot by an open area of the strip with a lot of traffic. Shiro hopped up sitting on the side of a fountain while they waited for their quarry.

"See, that's how it works - your people are so convinced that 'alien visitors' would have some profound agenda that all I have to do is wear this shirt-", Thaz tugged the bottom edges to show off the bold print 'I ESCAPED AREA 51 AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY SHIRT', "And hang out with a beer, and anybody who catches on and is dumb enough to say something about it just gets laughed at." 

"You know Keith used to get so pissed about that?" He was trying not to laugh; he probably shouldn't find it so funny, but it was hard not to laugh at looking back on it. "He was trying so hard to track things down, he'd rant for hours about the 'idiots' posting 'stupid hoax photos' and all the dumb conspiracy stories that 'got in the way'." 

Thaz snorted. "I'll have to pick up a good bribe to buy him off so he doesn’t kill us when he hears. Did you know that like, at least half of the 'solid' Bigfoot sightings were dumbass younger Galra sneaking off?" 

That finally pushed Shiro over the edge, and he had to steady himself on the ledge to keep balance while he cracked up laughing. "Man, it would be - Sendak would've hit the roof if he caught them!"

"You kidding? Man, I got one of them erasing all records of seeing me in return for not sharing recordings of him hanging around here!" Thaz grinned, puffing up proudly.

Pariq caught back up while they were laughing, juggling three large clear-plastic containers of layered, bright-colored alcohol; one of them was already about a third gone. Shiro struggled to get back to sitting normally, and having enough composure to not dump his drink as it was handed over.

They'd gotten through most of the booze by the time their target finally showed, Thaz tugging Shiro's shoulder and pointing.

The Garrison's head professor of theoretical xenobiology was across the street, staring at the three of them, slack-jawed and pointing.

Shiro grinned, waving enthusiastically, with a yell of "HEEEEY, PROFESSOR YEUN!"; the two aliens joined him in waving.

The Professor's eyes went wider, stabbing the air with the pointing finger.

Thaz's balance wobbled a little, and Shiro put an arm over the Drij's shoulder, grinning and definitely somewhere drunk himself.

The Professor gathered himself, clearly planning to dart through the passing crowds after them.

They let him get halfway there before they took off running themselves, the crowds and chaos making up for their lack of sobriety. Shiro briefly lost track of Pariq, but the Wayfinder reappeared soon after with a whoop of "GOT HIS CAMERA!", waving the trophy in the air as he picked up the pace. 

Just as Shiro had expected, the chase went all the way outside the city to the ship, hidden under a camouflage field; Shiro stayed on the ramp, grabbing onto one of the side supports with the metal arm so he could turn and wave one last time as the ship started liftoff. The professor was left staring up at the empty sky in the middle of the desert, with nothing to show for it.

Later on, when Shiro sobered up, he would ponder if he should feel bad for indulging in petty revenge. The moment of doubt would be only that - a moment.


End file.
